Auschwitz (32 page)

Coincidentally, Helena's first (and potentially last) day at work in “Canada” coincided with the birthday of one of the SS men who supervised work in the sorting barrack—Franz Wunsch.

Wunsch asked the Kapo to ensure that the girl who had sung so memorably for him returned to work in “Canada” the following day, and by making this request he saved her life. Helena was spared from the Penal Commando and became a fixture in “Canada.” But, while Wunsch looked kindly on her from that first meeting, initially Helena “hated” him. She knew he could be violent—she heard rumors from other inmates of how he had killed a prisoner for dealing in contraband.

Over the next days and weeks, however, Helena watched as he continued to treat her with kindness. When he went on leave he sent her boxes of “cookies,” which were delivered to her through the intermediary of a “pipel”—the boys who were the servants of the Kapos (and often served them homosexually as well). Upon his return, Wunsch took to doing something even more daring—sending Helena notes.

Wunsch had his own office within “Canada,” and he tried to think of excuses to get Helena to come and see him. Once he asked her to manicure his nails.

Over time, however, Helena came to realize that—incredible as it had at first seemed to her—she could depend on Wunsch. Knowing Wunsch's feelings for her gave her a “sense of security.” Says Helena, “I thought, ‘This person won't allow anything to happen to me.'” This emotion was compounded when one day Helena learned from a fellow Slovakian that her sister, Róžínka, and her two young children had been seen in the camp—and that they were being taken to the crematorium. Helena heard this devastating news when she was in her barracks at Birkenau after work. Despite the curfew, she left the barracks and ran to the nearby crematorium. Wunsch learned about Helena's actions and he caught up with her as she neared the crematorium. He first shouted to the other SS men that she was “an excellent worker in his warehouse.” Then he threw her down on the ground and started beating her for breaking the curfew, so that any SS members watching would not be aware of the relationship between them. Wunsch had already been told that Helena had run to the crematorium because her sister had been taken there and so he asked her: “Quickly, tell me your sister's name before it's too late.” Helena told him, “Róžínka,” and also said that she had arrived with her two small children. “Children can't live here!” said Wunsch as he ran down into the crematorium.

He managed to find Róžínka inside the crematorium and dragged her out, saying she was another of his workers. But her children died in the gas chamber. Wunsch subsequently managed to arrange for Róžínka to work alongside Helena in “Canada.”

The other women working in “Canada” saw how upset Helena was by the constant questioning from her sister about the fate of her children. So one day they told Róžínka, “Stop pestering! The children are gone. You see the fire? That's where they burn children!” Róžínka went into shock. She became apathetic and “didn't want to live.” Only Helena's constant care and attention secured her sister's survival over the next months.

Emotionally distraught as Róžínka was by the terrible realization that her children had been taken from her and murdered, she was still fortunate—she remained alive herself. And, protected by her sister, she did survive the war. The other women in “Canada” looked on them both with mixed feelings.

Primarily as a result of Wunsch saving her sister's life, Helena's feelings for him changed radically, “Eventually, as time went by, I really did love him. He sacrificed his life [for me] more than once.” But this relationship was never consummated, unlike some others between the sexes in Auschwitz.

Their relationship was conducted by glances, hurried words and scribbled notes.

But, inevitably, because over time “all Auschwitz” knew about their feelings for each other, someone informed on them. Whether it was a prisoner or an SS man no one knows. But, as Helena puts it, “someone ratted.”

One day, as she was being marched back to the camp after work, a Kapo called Helena out of the line. She was taken to the punishment bunker in Block 11. “Every day they took me out and threatened me that if I didn't tell them what had gone on with this SS soldier then at that very moment they would kill me. I stood there and insisted that nothing had been going on.” Wunsch had been arrested at the same time and, like Helena, under questioning he denied that any relationship existed. So eventually, after five days of interrogation, both of them were released. Helena was further “punished” by being made to work on her own in a section of the “Canada” barracks, away from the other women, and Wunsch was careful to be more circumspect in his dealings with her. Nonetheless, as is shown in Chapter 6, Wunsch went on protecting Helena and her sister until Auschwitz was no more.

The story of the relationship between Helena and Wunsch is a profoundly important one. For tales of the rawness of emotion at the brutal end of the human spectrum—murder, rape, theft, and betrayal—are commonplace in Auschwitz. How much rarer is a story of love. And the fact that love could blossom in such circumstances, between a Jewish woman and an SS guard who was known for his brutality, is nothing short of astounding. Like so much that happened in Auschwitz, were the facts to be imagined in a work of fiction they would be dismissed as unbelievable.

It is also worth noting, however, that circumstances played a decisive role in permitting the relationship to flourish. It is virtually impossible to believe that Wunsch would have fallen in love with Helena had she still been working in the demolition commando. There would have been neither the opportunity
for them to come into close contact, nor the chance of Wunsch protecting her once they did. And, not least, she would never have had the chance of captivating him by singing a song in German for his birthday. In “Canada,” however, not only was there contact between the SS men and Jewish women, there was also the chance that long-term relationships could develop. It is not surprising that proportionately more women survived Auschwitz as a result of working in “Canada” than almost anywhere else.

The relationship between Wunsch and Helena is also, of course, symptomatic of how far the reality of Auschwitz had strayed from Himmler's aspirations for the camp. He would have seen Wunsch's actions as part of a wider pattern of “corruption” at Auschwitz, and in the autumn of 1943, with the arrival of SS Obersturmführer (1st lieutenant) Konrad Morgen, an attempt was made to put the overall situation, as far as the SS leadership was concerned, “right.” Morgen's visit was to have dramatic consequences, for he was no ordinary SS officer but a judge of the SS reserve and an examining magistrate of the State Criminal Police Office. He had been sent to Auschwitz as part of a concerted effort by higher SS authorities to investigate corruption in the camps—in direct contradiction, of course, of Himmler's pious statement at Posen that “we have taken nothing from them [
i.e.,
the Jews] ourselves.”

Oskar Groening and his comrades were well aware of the reasons for Morgen's arrival: “I guess that the ever-increasing corruption became so obvious that they said, ‘We have to stem that—stem the tide of corruption.'” But the actual timing of Morgen's raid on the non-commissioned officers' barracks at Birkenau came as a complete surprise. Groening returned from a trip to Berlin to find “two of my comrades in jail. In one locker they had found fountain pens and a tin of sardines, and in the other guy's locker I don't know what they found, but he later hanged himself. And my locker was sealed.”

Morgen and his colleagues had not yet opened Groening's locker because they insisted on carrying out their investigation with the owner present. As Groening saw it, this was his great good fortune. The front door of the locker was sealed so that it would be obvious if the locker was opened—but Morgen had not reckoned with the ingenuity of Groening and his comrades.

Groening may have escaped sanction himself, but Morgen found plenty of evidence from others that pointed to only one conclusion—corruption at Auschwitz was widespread. “The conduct of the SS staff was beyond any of the standards that you'd expect from soldiers,” Morgen later testified.

And, perhaps even more worryingly for those at SS headquarters, he uncovered evidence not only of financial corruption but also of sexual wrongdoing. Most shocking of all was that one of those implicated was the commandant himself, Rudolf Höss. Morgen was nothing if not a tenacious investigator, and he pursued the allegations against Höss for more than a year. He eventually interviewed his key witness, a former Auschwitz prisoner called Eleonore Hodys, in a prison hospital in Munich in October 1944.

Hodys had been an Austrian political prisoner at Auschwitz, arriving in one of the first women's transports in March 1942. Classified as “Reichsdeutsche” (citizen of the German Reich) she was immediately placed in a privileged position in the camp and was selected to work as a servant in Höss's own house. In May 1942, with his wife away, Höss made a pass at Hodys and tried to kiss her. Frightened, she ran off and hid in the lavatory. According to her testimony she was then summoned to the house some
weeks later—when Höss was in hospital recovering from a riding accident—and dismissed by Frau Höss. It is reasonable to assume that Höss's wife was suspicious of the developing relationship between Hodys and her husband. Subsequently Hodys was imprisoned—not in Block 11, but in the special jail in the basement of the main administration building, which was chiefly reserved for SS soldiers guilty of serious transgressions. This was a strange place for an Auschwitz prisoner to be held. But Hodys was no ordinary Auschwitz prisoner, and she had been transferred to the SS jail for a reason.